Few learning professionals dispute the importance of human skills. Especially when it comes to leadership development. What gets tricky is knowing where to focus.
Soft skills—or as we like to call them, human skills—are an essential part of any leadership training program. Skills like creativity, adaptability, and emotional intelligence are more in-demand than ever, for early-career talent through the C-suite.
We kicked off this series to share the human skills we’ve seen make the most difference for the clients we work with. It offers a “behind-the-scenes” look at what we’ve seen work best for helping learners put these skills into practice.
Our last post in the series discussed adaptability for emerging leaders. Today, we’re going to dive into EQ, or emotional intelligence.
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🤔 What Is EQ?
Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand, manage, and effectively express one's own emotions, as well as the capacity to recognize, empathize with, and influence the emotions of others. It’s a sought-after skill in the workplace. One survey indicated that 75% of people managers used emotional intelligence level as a key criteria for decisions around promotions and raises.
Leaders with high EQ not only have increased resilience, well-being, and life satisfaction themselves, but they also improve these factors among the teams and colleagues they work with.
Basically: emotionally intelligent leaders create a ripple effect of positive outcomes across the organization. So you can picture EQ as essentially a human-skills force multiplier for good vibes, and good work, across the business.
The Core Behaviors of Leaders with High EQ
We’ve identified five behaviors that set high-EQ leaders apart from those who struggle with this skill. These behaviors are consistent across different industries and types of organizations, so whether you work in tech, or entertainment, or consumer goods, these will apply.
Now let’s consider: 1) what these behaviors look like in action, and 2) how your leadership development program can give learners a chance to not only understand these behaviors, but also put them into practice. 💪
1. Self-Awareness
Self-awareness is the ability to understand your emotions, strengths, values, goals, and weaknesses. When leaders make decisions or problem-solve with a lack of self-awareness, it can lead to worse outcomes. In contrast, well-honed self-awareness makes for better problem-solving, where leaders process with clarity and avoid knee-jerk emotional reactions.
Self-Awareness in Action
What does self-awareness look like? Make sure your leadership development program creates space for learners to test run behaviors like:
- Acknowledge when they’re feeling stressed out
- Take steps to manage it
One effective way to develop self-awareness is to understand your emotional baseline. This is an individual’s typical emotional state under normal circumstances. In other words, it’s the default set of emotions (and the intensity of those emotions) that someone experiences in their day-to-day life.
There are lots of ways that learners can start to get a sense of their emotional baseline. Emotion wheels (here’s one example), mood tracking apps, journaling, mindfulness, and feedback from trusted sources can all help. Regular prompts throughout the learning experience should help them check in with their emotions and reassess their understanding of their baseline and its fluctuations.
2. Self-Regulation
Self-regulation means managing emotions and impulses effectively. Once learners understand their emotional baseline, they can use this knowledge to aid their self-regulation. Increasing self-knowledge—of the way they react to stress, of the patterns of emotions they experience at work—will help them get back to baseline faster. This will likely increase both their satisfaction and productivity in the workplace.
Self-Regulation in Action
To practice-self regulation, your program should give learners the chance to:
- Manage impulses effectively
- Pause and think before reacting to a challenging situation
One strategy learners can use here is “If…then” planning. This helps them create specific plans for managing emotions in anticipated situations. It can be as simple as: "If I feel frustrated during a meeting, then I will take three deep breaths before responding."
Incorporate opportunities for these exercises into the learning, paired with relatable scenarios they’ll work through together with other learners. (For example, dealing with a stressful text from a manager while stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic.) This will help them develop self-regulation muscles they can then use when a real curveball is thrown their way.
3. Motivation
Motivation is all about being driven to achieve your goals with enthusiasm and persistence. Rather than giving up easily when faced with obstacles, a leader with high motivation will approach challenges with persistence—even curiosity.
Motivation in Action
To help learners uplevel this aspect of EQ, ensure your leadership development program includes opportunities to practice the key behaviors that support motivation, including:
- Setting challenging goals
- Staying committed to those goals
- Finding intrinsic satisfaction in work
To help learners navigate obstacles, they can practice reframing. Reframing involves changing our perspective on a situation to alter our emotional response. For example, rather than thinking of a project as overwhelming, you can think of it as a way to develop new skills.
This is one area where the learning can get a little “meta.” As with any development opportunity, learners will experience challenges throughout the program and can practice maintaining their motivation. Build in opportunities for reflection, where learners can consider how they’ve responded to these obstacles and how they can stay on track to achieving their goals.
Developing these motivation-boosting habits will help them continue these behaviors beyond the learning experience, too.
4. Empathy
Empathy means understanding and sharing the feelings of others and responding appropriately. It’s an essential part of leadership, with empathetic leadership positively related to job performance, particularly as people progress in their careers.
Empathy in Action
We sometimes talk to people who believe that empathy isn’t a skill that can be learned. However, learners can practice this behavior when your program allows them to:
- Listen actively to others
- Show compassion
- Consider others’ perspectives in decision-making
In one example, you can make the active listening component of this behavior even more concrete by sharing phrases learners can use to show they’re listening during a conversation, like “Can you elaborate on…”
(Check out some further examples for active listening in the third tip on our blog post about customizing your leadership development content!)
5. Social Skills
Social skills are building and maintaining positive relationships with others. As learners hone their EQ, they’ll refine their social skills as well. The ability to maintain a consistent emotional baseline—and return to that baseline after experiencing triggers—will provide a foundation for better collaboration.
Social Skills in Action
So that learners can put social skills into practice, a learning experience should create opportunities to:
- Communicate effectively
- Resolve conflicts constructively
- Collaborate with team members
The social element of learning is particularly crucial here. It’s through discussion, debate, and even—or maybe especially—disagreement that learners will get a safe opportunity to hone these skills before they put them to use in the real world.
A Key Skill for Managing Yourself
Investing in EQ is, more than anything else, a direct investment in the “innermost” layer of what we call the three-layer framework: managing yourself, managing relationships, and managing external circumstances. (Learn more about why we use this framework in the first post in this series, on adaptability.)
By learning to better manage themselves, your emerging leaders will build the self-awareness and regulation skills necessary for great leadership. This, in turn, feeds into highly functional management styles across all three spheres.
In this way, EQ is the first and foundational step to managing relationships and navigating external circumstances.
Why This Skill Matters
Ultimately, leaders with high EQ across all key layers become powerful assets for your organization. They experience:
- Improved emotional self-regulation
- Enhanced stress management
- Better communication in all areas of life
- Increased resilience to emotional challenges
- Greater overall well-being and life satisfaction
And they help foster these qualities amongst their teams and the people they work with, too. Their self-understanding powers their resilience and their collaboration with others—and your teams and your organization will reap the benefits of this investment many times over.
For a more comprehensive view of building great leadership development programs, download your copy of our practice-forward guide for building world-class leadership development experiences (no matter the size of your L&D team!).
Interested to learn more about bringing Next Shift Learning’s Emerging Leaders Program to your organization? Get in touch here. We’d love to hear from you!
